THE Beaulacs belong to a tribe of French Canadians that has peopled half
the countryside. They have various nicknames—Black Jack, Little Joe,
Yankee Jim, Big John, Rose Marie, Marie John, and so on. The Little Jack
Beaulacs live at Loon Bay, round the point and three miles away. The
road to Loon Lake Station starts at their landing. They live in a barn,
a sixteen-by-twenty-foot log structure, banked with earth to keep out the
cold. In its one room, along with a double bed, a cooking stove, table,
sideboard, sewing machine, rocking chair, boxes, pots and pans, and a
clutter of harness and old junk of all kinds, live John and Rose and the
six young Beaulacs, beginning with sixteen-year-old Louis and ending with
the baby. There is one door and a small window, that, so far as I know,
has never been opened. In summer, when the door is left ajar, the room
is apt to be further inhabited by hens, ducks, cats, and even a lamb or
two.
The house stands in a clearing on a perfectly bare hill, but in summer,
the whole slope is golden with sheets of tansy, and the small dug-out
milk house is shaded by a giant lilac bush, sole remnant of some
long-forgotten garden. At the foot of the hill, rotting, flat-bottomed
boats wallow in the mud, and there the little Beaulacs spend happy days
fishing for mudcats, wading for frogs, screaming, wrangling, and throwing
stones into the water.
They have not always lived in a barn. They have had two other houses,
each burned to the ground, with all the pitiful furnishings it
contained—crushing blows to people as poor as the Beaulacs. After the
last fire they moved into the barn, the only shelter left standing,
intending to build again in the spring. But log-hauling is work,
building materials cost money, and time went on. Now they have settled
down contentedly in the barn, and will stay there, I doubt not, until
this roof falls down about their heads. They have no fear of another
fire. That would be impossible, for, as one of the children tells me,
the last one happened on the full of the moon—sure sign that they can
never be burned out again.
Like other men of the settlement, John Beaulac works at the mica mine,
hunts, fishes, and farms a bit. Rose walks barefoot over the fields,
after the plow, digs the small garden, raises chickens, picks wild
berries, and sells frogs to the summer campers, contriving thus to supply
the few clothes and groceries needed. For the rest, they live a happy,
carefree life in the open, and the young Beaulacs scramble up somehow.
Rose handles the boxes of supplies that come from Toronto for the island,
driving them in from Loon Lake and bringing them across the lake by wagon
or boat, as the time of the year permits. Last time she refused, very
firmly, to allow me to pay for that hauling.
“We ain’t agoin’ to tax you nothin’,” she declared.
When I expostulated, she only shook her frowsy head more violently.
“No,” she said, “we do it fer you fer nothin’. It ain’t like you had a
man here to do fer you,” she reasoned.
Then she looked at her own man with pride and at me with a vast pity,
because I had no man to work myself to death for.
In a pioneer neighborhood, where every woman must have some man, however
worthless, to hew the wood and care for the stock, and where every man
must have some woman, to cook and to keep the house, however lazy a
slattern she may be, I, who live alone, pay for my wood and draw the
water, must be a creature not to be understood.
Yesterday the Beaulacs invited me to go with them to the races in
Henderson’s Bay—a trying out of the neighborhood horses before the yearly
races to be held at Queensport next week. Scrambling and falling down
the slippery trail, in answer to their halloo, I found a straw-filled
wagon body set on runners and drawn by Beaulac’s old mare. She, not
having been “sharp shod,” slipped and slid, threatening to break a leg at
every step, while the wagon slewed from side to side over the ice. It
was the first time that I had driven over a lake. My heart was in my
mouth all the way.
Henderson’s Bay, a long arm of Many Islands, stretches for a mile into
the land. It is a beautiful horseshoe, with the farm house at the toe.
The course was laid out on the dull green ice, little cedar bushes set up
to mark the quarter miles. An old reaper, frozen in near the shore,
served as the judges’ stand.
We drew up at the side of the track, in the lee of a high rock that
somewhat sheltered us from the piercing wind. It was a friendly scene.
The encircling arms of the shore stretched round and seemed to gather us
close. The smoke from the house chimneys curled up to the low-leaning
gray sky, and Henderson’s herd, led by a dignified old bull, strolled
down over the hill as though to see the race. Far away on the ice, black
spots appeared, later discerned to be fast-moving buggies, sleighs, and
wagons coming to the meet. When they were all assembled there must have
been as many as seven vehicles. There were four horses to be tried.
They were harnessed in turn to a little two-wheeled affair called a bike.
There is only one “bike” here, so no two horses could run at a time, and
there had to be a great unhitching and harnessing again after every trial
of speed. Joe Boggs, the neighborhood jockey, drove with arms and legs
all spraddled out, like a spider, and urged on his poor steeds with wild
cries of: “Hi-hi-hi-hi”—enough to frighten a sensible horse to death.
I have never beheld a more professional looking horseman than Mr. Boggs.
His disreputable old squirrel-skin cap, that hung off the back of his
head, his high boots, the bow of his legs, the squint of his eye, even
the way he chewed a straw between races, bespoke the true jockey. One
felt that if Joe Boggs could not put a horse over the track, no one
could.
Rose Beaulac too was a keen judge of a horse. She criticized the entries
unsparingly—Rose, with her long, dry-looking coon skin coat, and her
dirty red “tuque” cocked over one eye.
“That old mare,” she would say, cuttingly, “I knowed her in her best
days, and then she wasn’t much.”
That settled the mare for us. Our money was not on her.
There was, however, one horse that she did consider worth praise. She
told me with awe that his owner had refused four hundred dollars for
him—a staggering sum. So valued was this animal that he was not to be
allowed to run any more until the Queensport races, but when it was
learned that I wished to admire him, his owner consented to put him once
round the course, for my pleasure.
After the contestants had each done his best—or worst—the meet broke up,
with many “Good-days” and “Come-overs,” and we drove back over the ice,
the old mare plunging and sliding along seemingly quite accustomed to
being driven, at a gallop, over a sheet of glass.
The eye swept the outline of the shore on which stand the seven
homesteads of this arm of the lake. Each roof shelters a family of a
different race and creed. Many Islands is a type of the whole of this
strong, young country, that takes in men of all lands and minds, gives
them her fertile prairies almost for the asking, and makes them over into
good Canadians.
There are the Blakes, from “The States,” and aggressively American; the
Jacksons, Canadian born and Methodist; the Hendersons, English and Church
of England; the McDougals, Scotch and Presbyterian; the Cassidys, Irish
and Catholic; Harry Sprig-gins, a sharp-faced little London cockney; and
the Beaulacs, true French Canadian. Once in a while a Swede wanders in
and hires out for the wood-cutting, or an Indian comes along through the
lakes in his canoe, and camps for awhile on one of the islands. Amid all
the differences of belief and the clash of temperament, the people manage
to be friendly and neighborly; the children play together; the young folk
marry, and the next generation is all Canadian.
They all speak English, but when one stops to listen, literal
translations of idioms and queer turns of phrase stand out. Foret always
speaks of a “little, small” bird or tree or what not, and for him things
are always “perfectly all right.”
“Do yer moind thot pig, I sold Black Jack?” asks Uncle Dan Cassidy.
“’Ow har you to-d’y?” inquires Harry Spriggins.
“Oh, not too bad,” answers John Beaulac. “_Pas trop mal_,” he is saying,
of course.
When John has finished a job he stands off, hands in pockets, and
observes: “That iss now ahl bunkum sah.” After a moment’s pondering one
knows that “_Bon comme ça_” is what he means.
They speak of coming home through the “Brooly.” That is the scrub wood
through which a forest fire once swept. It is the land “brulé”—burned
over. While they live in Canada their talk is of far away lands, and it
is to the “Old Country” that they mean to return some day.
And from the house on the island I see the life go by—the stern, bare
life of the country—with its never-ending toil, its uncounted sacrifices,
its feuds, its ready charities and the piteous, unnecessary sufferings of
the sick. Blessed be the rural telephone, lately come to Many Islands,
that has made it possible for Dr. LeBaron to reach a patient the day he
is called. Thrice blessed the tinkle of those little bells that bring
the voices of the world to the farms, shut in behind the snowdrifts. To
the women, dulled with labor and shaken with loneliness, they are the
little bells of courage.
I stopped at a farm the other day—a very lonely place. Scarce were the
first greetings over when the young mistress of the house said, proudly:
“We have the telephone here. Would you care to talk to any of your
friends?”
Something in her tone, the eager shining of her eyes, brought a rush of
tears to my own. It was the supreme effort of hospitality. She was
offering me the thing that had meant life itself to her, the dear
privilege of speaking with a friend.